The winner of two Whitbreads and the Somerset Maugham Award for biographies of Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas More—and famous for his biography of London itself—Peter Ackroyd here brings the age of the Tudors to vivid life, chronicling English history from Henry VIII's cataclysmic break with Rome through the epic rule of Elizabeth I. At the beginning of the 16th century, England was still largely feudal and looked to Rome for direction; at the end, it was a country where good governance was the duty of the state, not the church, and where men and women began to look to themselves for answers rather than to those who ruled them.

"The Tudor era was pivotal in English history and remains of perennial interest to the general reader. Ackroyd takes on this much-written-about family history in his new, highly engaging book.... Ackroyd presents in rich prose and careful explanations how the English Reformation was not a movement of the people but a personal project of King Henry, who, Ackroyd insists, remained, despite his removal of papal authority over the English church, an orthodox Catholic. Under his immediate heir, the boy-king Edward VI, England veered sharply Protestant, but Edward's elder sister, Mary I, during her brief occupancy of the throne, forced England back to full Catholicism. The genius of the next and last of Henry VIII's children, Elizabeth I, was to establish a middle course between these two extremes."—Booklist (starred review)